


My Eyes (On You)

by afterandalasia



Series: Femslash Yuletide 2014 [17]
Category: Aladdin (1992), Frozen (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Biological Weapons, Crossover Pairings, F/F, Fairy Tale Elements, Flashbacks, Hope, Human Experimentation, Science Fiction, Stories within Stories, Storytelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-12
Updated: 2017-07-12
Packaged: 2018-12-01 10:32:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11484549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterandalasia/pseuds/afterandalasia
Summary: "Tell me a story," Elsa says."I'll tell you the best of stories," Jasmine replies.The best of stories, when all is said and done, because it istheirs. Through the dying of the world, and the horror of the corporation that caused it, they had found each other. And they hadlived.Written for Femslash Yuletide Day 19, "Holiday Movies/Stories". It went very off-piste on the 'stories' part.





	My Eyes (On You)

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by the Femslash Yuletide prompt (prompt from 2013, because I copied the wrong list, but still) "Holiday Movies/Stories". It's... well, it's plenty of stories, not so much on the holidays front, and it went far enough into strange territory that I'm not going to be adding it to the Femslash Yuletide collection, even if I am adding it to my own series.
> 
> Title from, of all places, the _Disney Princess Enchanted Tales: Follow Your Dreams_ short, which features Jasmine's only solo song(!), "I've Got My Eyes On You". It's about moving past fear, and looking to a calmer and more hopeful place, rather than worrying about how difficult it might be to get there.

“Tell me a story.”

Jasmine huffed. “I always tell the stories.”

“I told the last story,” said Elsa, and Jasmine could hear the smirk in her voice. “I made puppets and everything.”

That she had, and not even Jasmine could argue with it. Instead she pretended to be annoyed, wriggling until their hammock swayed in place and Elsa grabbed at the edge of it for balance, then giggling. Elsa swatted her.

“Fine.” Jasmine tucked one arm behind her head, letting Elsa get comfortable again. The sky above was clear and velvety-dark, spangled with stars; that was one of the benefits of the changed world, she supposed. What beauty was left in it was more visible. “What sort of story?”

Elsa fell quiet. On the top of the tower, on their hammock slung between two metal posts, it was almost silent around them. The days of the groaning hordes beyond their walls were gone. Now that Elsa was here.

“A good story,” said Elsa, finally.

So the nightmares had been stirring in her again. Jasmine had noticed a chill to their room when she awoke, but had not been sure whether it was the first days of winter drifting in. Elsa curled close, playing with the end of her braid, a silvery line in the darkness.

“I’ll tell you the best story,” said Jasmine.

They would both tell it, from time to time, put their own spin on it and turn it into something else. Set it in space, or the Wild West, or the days of knights and kings. Now, she settled on a fairy tale.

“Once upon a time,” she said, and felt Elsa chuckle, “there was a girl who lived behind her father’s walls–”

“A beautiful princess,” Elsa interrupted, teasing in every lilt of her voice.

Jasmine huffed, but acquiesced. It was the style of the story, she supposed. “Fine. Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess who lived behind her father’s walls, in the highest room of the tallest tower.”

She remembered the stories, like ghosts, from Before. Not childhood; that wasn’t quite the right way to think of things now. There was only Before, and After. Everyone had experienced the same traumatic growth, whether they were already adults or not. It was surprisingly easy to pluck words and phrases from them, even for a world so changed.

“The whole world had been cursed with sickness, by the wickedest fairy in all of the land. But the girl’s father, who had been the Sultan of his land;” or the Mayor of Agrabah Town, but that did not exactly fit the fairy tale; “had his people build walls and protect themselves, and they managed to keep it at bay.”

The worst of it, at least. The dead might have scratched at the walls and stuck their rotting fingers through the smallest of gaps, but somehow Agrabah had pulled through. First they had waited, for the army or the police, rescue that never came. Then… they had survived.

“But the princess was not allowed to help her people;” _you are too young_ , her father had said, even when Jasmine had shouted back that there were children barely older than her holding machine guns to protect the walls. _You understand what I am doing with the farming, and the organisation. You can help them in that way._ It had not felt like helping, when she had been young and foolish. “And her rebellious heart yearned to do so. So finally, on her sixteenth birthday, the princess snuck out of her tower, clad herself in armour, and stole her father’s best horse, and went out in search of the magic that might help her people.”

Okay, so it had been a car, and police riot gear, that she had taken. But it had been armour and a stead at the time. And technically speaking, she had been looking for _anything_ , anything _new_ that was not just the result of raiding an old K-Mart or finding a pharmacy that had not yet been looted. She was used to cataloguing what the scavenger teams brought back from their runs, and knew how little, and how little variety, they found.

“Meanwhile,” she said, slipping a hand down across Elsa’s ribs, feeling the calm rise and fall of her breathing and revelling in it. “Far away, in another kingdom, the same dark fairy who had cast the curse upon the land was trying to imbue a knight with powers that would make them into a fighter fit to defend their dark kingdom.”

It had taken Elsa a while, after they met, to admit what had happened to her. Reframing it into stories had made it easier. Taken from her parents as a child, subjected to experiments, it had only horrified her more when she realised that the organisation who had captured her was the very same as the one that had developed the disease that had so consumed the world. Biological warfare, on multiple fronts.

It told how far Elsa had come that there was only the slightest hitch in her breathing.

“But the knight escaped,” Jasmine continued. “Because she was strong and brave, and did not want to be a tool of the dark fairy. And she used what they had taught her to survive even in the wild, cursed world. Until, one day, her path crossed with that of the princess.”

“The knight had been travelling for a long time,” said Elsa, her voice a low murmur that Jasmine could feel as much as hear. “Through the darkness and the dead. She wondered if there was anything left in the world that still lived.”

Jasmine jostled in place, making the hammock swing again. “Who’s telling this story?”

Elsa gave an unladylike snort of laughter. “I thought you wanted me to.”

“ _Fine_ ,” she said, doing her best to sound put-upon even if she knew they could both hear the laughter in her voice. “We shall share it.”

Jasmine snuggled down, Elsa’s head fitting comfortably against her shoulder, their legs twined together. The cool breeze drifted over them, and they were high enough, far enough from the rotting ground, that the air was clear and fresh. It had been a long time since the air had smelled sweet.

“Finally, the knight came to an abandoned storehouse, in the middle of the deep, dark woods where shadows ran black and dangerous,” said Elsa.

A supermarket that was getting overgrown with kudzu. But the danger had certainly been real enough. “And by chance,” Jasmine added, “the princess was there also, having heard that perhaps there might be something there that could help her people.”

“At first, the knight feared that the dark fairy’s minions had come for her again,” Elsa said, voice dropping to little more than a whisper. Jasmine curled around her, keeping her warmth to Elsa’s permanently-cool skin, nuzzling against the top of her head. “But then she realised that it was a princess in borrowed armour, and her curiosity was piqued.”

“The princess promised the knight a safe place within her kingdom,” murmured Jasmine in return, “if the knight would return with her.”

“And because she did not speak of fighting, or of death, there is nothing in the world that would have prevented the knight from agreeing.”

Elsa had been grimy, fearful, and Jasmine in all of her naivete had feared that she was one of the dead that still walked the earth. But then Elsa had whirled, and suddenly there had been _ice_ all around them, ice coating the walls and the floor and the pick that Jasmine had clutched in one shaking hand. And then their eyes had met, in the dim light coming in from the partially-collapsed roof, and something had seemed to pass between them, something desperate and frightened but so utterly without malice that it had seemed like part of a different world.

Neither of them had used the word _magic_. They had not even spoke of it, as Jasmine filled the backpack she had brought with cans of food and what was left of the pharmacy. There was a safe there, still locked despite everything, scratched and scraped but still intact. But Elsa had used her ice to force it open and inside, oh, inside there had been medication that Jasmine’s people had been aching for.

Jasmine still remembered her hands shaking on the steering wheel as they made their way back, still remembered being unable to look Elsa in the eye.

_“I don’t care what you can do,” she had said, finally. “You’re alive. You’re a human. That’s all that matters.”_

She still remembered the way that Elsa had looked at her, fearful and disbelieving. She hadn’t understood just why at the time.

Later, much later, she would realise that Elsa had not thought of herself as human at all.

“So the knight pledged her sword to the princess’s cause,” said Elsa. “Whatever else might befall her kingdom.”

“Their kingdom,” Jasmine said, quietly.

Elsa fell still and silent for a long while, then reached up to take Jasmine’s hand, and twined their fingers together. “Our kingdom,” she echoed.

And Jasmine held her hand a little tighter, and watched the clear sparkling skies, and left the words _happily ever after_ hang unspoken. They both knew that the world was so fractured that it would never be put back together in the same way again, and what awaited them they could not say. But Elsa’s magic had helped at first to keep back the hordes of the dead, and then they had realised that she could do something far greater for them, something more wonderful, and after all of their years without electricity or power she had given them back the ability to keep things cold. Food no longer rotted. They could store medicines again, so long as they could find them. Then someone had dug up books on something called a _heat engine_ , and a single block of ice used to cool water gave them the ability to generate electricity again.

It was not the destruction of Elsa’s powers that had saved them, in the end. And finally, one day, she had confessed to Jasmine that yes, she understood, she _was_ human after all.

And sometimes, to be human was enough.


End file.
